Veggies, Creepers and Blue Birds

I am so excited that tomorrow is Friday as im sure you are just as excited as I am. I am hoping this weekend we can start tackling the master bathroom again. It's been sitting as an empty shell for far to long and now that I have a wild hair up my butt to finally start working on it again, well, we mine as well finish with the demo.

So I am currently in the process of transferring my domain {little-brick-house.com} over to Bluehost. So yes, expect to see a new design layout in the future because I will have a wordpress theme vs a Blogger template. I am so impatient though. My domain was unlocked by Google but now I have to wait for up to 7 days for the transfer to be completed {ugh}, in the mean time ive been working on some new graphics and just playing around with colors for the new blog. My inner graphic designer has also been reading up on wordpress and CSS until my head hurts. Needless to say I am still confused but you better believe I have a ton of tutorials bookmarked! {I try to stay prepared you know}.

Our tomatoes are growing like weeds. For reals. Im so happy too because I love tomatoes. I can easily slice up a tomato and just eat it like you would after slicing up an apple. We have 5 better boys and 3 plums growing. So excited for them to start ripening!

After some research, I discovered that this is Virginia Creeper. Who knew? I sure didn't. It's all over the yard!

I love seeing what new grows in the yard each Summer. Ever since we moved in 3yrs ago it seems like each Summer something new pops up. Our yard as a whole is truly one of my fav. places to be in the Summer. Running around, playing with J and Lola and just relaxing. It's so nice!

The little birdhouse that J made {with daddys help of course} has a new owner. Two little Blue birds have claimed this little house that is currently on one of our large oak tree's in the backyard. We have enjoyed watching them through the living room window, seeing what their up to. Im wondering if there are any eggs in there yet, I guess we will know soon when we hear little chirps coming from in there :)

Can you believe today is the last day of May and it's now June!? I seriously cannot believe how fast time is flying. here's to a slower Summer! Happy June!

Growing green

Happy Monday everyone.

It's a bit chilly down here in Florida this morning, at least to chilly for my liking.

So I am off work again today... Have to try and get an appt. in with the dermatologist today. I have started breaking out in Hives, which is weird. I have never gotten hives before and hives typically mean your having an allergic reaction to something. Im hoping she can give me some sort of super potent anti-itch/anti-hive medicine. I've just about doused myself in anti-itch creams... ugh. I'm over it.

Did I ever talk to you about our garden? No? Well we have started a new garden this year. Last year our garden was pretty sad. It was along the side of the house where it was a bit 'hidden' and well... it really didn't take off as much as we had hoped. That and it was ravaged by nasty large green horn worms.

So this year we moved the garden to other corner of the yard, back behind the pool.

We have ourselves some strawberry plants growing in a few pots around the actual bed of the garden.

A banana tree.

Josh made some herb boxes to hang along the top part of the fence. He drilled holes in the bottom for water drainage and then lined them with plastic, filled with potting soil and added some cilantro and basil {our most fav. herbs}.

The main bed had two more strawberry plants and 8 tomato plants.

I'm really looking forward to using some of our new veggies/fruits that we get from our garden. I have already used some cilantro and basil for some cooking and the flavors of using our own herbs vs. buying them at the grocery store seem so much more 'flavorful'.

We also planted an Orange tree in the back corner of the yard {other side}. Of course it's a baby and it will be awhile before it sprouts oranges but I sure can't wait for that, love me some oranges! We also have 4 plum tree's in the yard which were there before we moved in.

How about you guys, do you have a garden or plans for a garden this year?

Ya dig it?

Do you ever just have such a great weekend that it actually makes Monday not seem so bad? I know that sounds weird, you would think that if you had an awesome weekend you would just dread Monday right? But because I am the resident weirdo, to me, this weekend was just so fulfilling that even though I have to wake up at 4:30 in the AM to go to work tomorrow, im actually looking forward to it.

I know, I know your asking yourself WHAT could I have possibly done for my weekend to be THAT good. Well... I did some gardening. Yep. I am 26yrs old and I spent my weekend painting [more on that later in the week] and gardening. Does this mean I have officially crossed over into 'I'm old' status?

So here is part of the backyard. It's the 'side yard', that goes up along the side of the house. This area gets sunlight pretty much for the whole day. We have 3 large oak tree's back here so the rest of the yard is shady a lot so this was the perfect spot to create a garden.

First we measured the area and than got to work 'tilling' up the grass and dirt [talk about a major workout]!

After a trip to Lowes to buy some landscaping timbers and what seemed like a truck load of top soil, we returned home to cut and screw the boards together.

Next up... Reading about how I can score some awesome Tax breaks... or not. No this paper was going into the bottom of the garden [on top of the original soil]. Newspapers today are printed with safe inks, and pigments are binded together using soy-based oils and all printed with non-toxic chemicals [unlike papers from back in the day]. Lining the bottom of your garden with newspaper helps prevent weed-seeds from germinating because it keeps all light out and traps moisture and from what I have heard from other people who use this method is that it works FAR better than your plastic, nylon and or rubber products.

So we have the paper lined at the bottom of our garden, held down with clumps of dirt.

Lastly was filling the garden with bags of top soil [we used about 12 bags [$0.98 @ Lowes] for our 8x6 area] and than planted our seeds.

What did we plant you ask?

Some of my favorite Herbs and Veggies [I really can't wait for some of those cucumbers]!

On another related note, Josh moved the Solar panel over to the corner of this part of the yard also, because of all the sunlight. What are our plans for this?

We will be attaching a section of gutter to this end of the house [which is right next to the Garden].

Which will than lead to a future rain barrel that will sit in that corner [once the wire for the panel is moved of course]. Luckily we already have the barrel, we just need to buy the kit and set it all up. We're hoping to create some sort of pump [well that would be josh creating it, im just hoping] that will be hooked to the solar panel, that way whenever I need to water the veggies I can use the water from the barrel [hose and pressure].

So we will be growing veggies and helping them grow by using water from our rain barrel which will be run using energy from the sun. How cool is that!? Now let's just hope my veggies actually grow and that those pesky Box Worms stay away!!!

What about you.. Any Gardening this year?